Developers have high willingness, but low awareness of solutions

GERMANY: Cross-platform tools are designed to accelerate the mobile app development process and overcome OS and device fragmentation. With the help of a well-designed and appropriate cross-platform tool, developers are able to save time and money in mobile app development.

However, amongst the developer community there is rather low awareness of the available solutions as well as lack of knowledge about the possibilities of these tools.

A major barrier for the success of cross-platform tools lies in the identification of the proper tool by potential users.

Non-users mostly name the following factors to be important for the choice of a tool: “number of supported platforms” (70 percent), “performance” of the tool (64 percent), “cost of the cross-platform tool” (62 percent), and “development time and cost” (59 percent). Thus, the lack of knowledge about strengths and weaknesses of cross-platform tools is the main barrier for their usage.

According to these criteria, developers who are using cross-platform tools rate them positively in general: 84 percent are satisfied with the number of supported platforms and 67 percent say the tool helps them to save 30 percent time and more.

The license costs for using a cross-platform tool did not exceed costs of $5,000 in 79 percent of the observed cases. Only the performance of apps built with cross-platform tools was criticized by 44 percent.These findings are part of our global survey “Cross-Platform App Development Tool Benchmarking”. In this survey we ask mobile developers to compare cross-platform tools to pure native app development.

The comparison contains amongst others costs, complexity, result quality, and development speed of the different approaches. The results of the survey will be published in a comprehensive report in summer 2013. So far more than 800 developers participated and 80 solutions are represented.

The survey is still open. We invite you to participate. For your engagement we will thank you by sending you the “Cross-Platform App Development Tool Benchmarking” report as soon as it’s published.